Spring ERE Conference: The Disconnect Between Recruiters and TA Leaders

Nicole Lindenbaum May 6, 2015

Last week, I made the trek from New York to San Diego, from winter weather to sunny beaches, to attend the Spring ERE Conference where Jibe was a platinum sponsor. This is a great opportunity every year to network with talent acquisition professionals and learn what issues are keeping them up at night. We also get to learn about best practices in talent acquisition and how new trends are affecting the industry. In this post, I’ll share a few key takeaways.

There are always a number of great sessions, but this year, one particular session stood out to me. Rob McIntosh, ERE’s relatively new Chief Data Analyst, covered the results of a survey that ERE conducted this spring. In The State of Talent Acquisition, Rob discussed some surprising revelations:

32% of organizations don’t track cost per hire

34% of organizations don’t track source time

40% of organizations don’t track hiring manager satisfaction

44% of organizations don’t track candidate satisfaction

One of the biggest trends Rob noticed in the survey was that there was usually a significant gap in the perspective of recruiters vs. the perspective of talent acquisition leaders. If these teams are not aligned in how they perceive the overall health of their TA organization, they won’t ever be able to improve. For example, on average recruiters say it takes seven days longer to fill roles than TA managers say. How do you begin to optimize when you can’t even agree on key metrics?

As a marketer, I deal with this first hand. Marketing and Sales often perceive the health of the business differently. As one example, Sales might think they are not getting enough leads from Marketing, while Marketing might think Sales just isn’t acting on the leads they get. The way that we begin to come to agreement is to start tracking our key metrics and processes. We look to the data and numbers. By establishing key metrics and consistently reviewing the data together, we can start to have constructive discussions about how we can improve together, as a team. The same just might be true for front line recruiters and talent acquisition managers.

The good news? According to the same survey, 52% of TA leaders plan to use analytics in next 18 months. This means organizations are trending towards actually tracking their data and measuring results. Using the numbers as a starting point, talent acquisition teams can start to truly optimize and improve results. In the very near future, we’ll be seeing a lot more recruiting decisions that are driven by insights from data.

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